Hi there! 👋 §

I research recommender systems and user behavior at Harvard University §

I am currently the Michael von Clemm Fellow at Harvard, where I spend my time coding and thinking about how code is used. Right now, I am trying to understand the role of recommender systems in identity formation and manipulation.

I am also a research assistant at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media, where Professor David S. Craig and I are considering the political power of the creator economy.

I hold a BA in Music from Oxford University with the Gibbs Prize and an MPhil in Digital Humanities from Cambridge University.

I made this page to house my CV. But that seemed a little dull. So now it’s a catch-all for projects I am working on (academic and personal).

CV + Contact Me!

Here’s my CV, but don’t be shy. Get in touch via email or LinkedIn!

Research 📄 §

Current §

Curation Culture: Recommender Systems as Technologies of Self and Other

Harvard, Independent Research, 2023-

Do recommender systems serve users as they are or as they wish to be?

Creators for Change (Research Assistant to Professor David S. Craig)

Harvard, Institute for Rebooting Social Media, 2023-

What does it mean for influencers to influence in the literal, political sense?

Creator Constitution Conference (Research Assistant to Professor David S. Craig)

Harvard, Institute for Rebooting Social Media, 2023-

What is a creator and what rights should they have?

Past §

POV: You're Reading about Playlisting Practices, Algorithmic Control, and Supercultural Resistance

Cambridge, MPhil Dissertation, 2022-2023

Recommender systems claim to provide personalized content and advertisements. What happens when we pretend to be someone else?

I explore how point-of-view (POV) playlists on YouTube destabilize assumptions about the individual latent within recommender systems. I observe discontinuities between the idealized, algorithmically predictable listener and their appropriation of multiple POVs. Drawing on (post-)subcultural studies and Deleuzian philosophy, I interpret these POVs as “supercultural experiences”: distinctive, but generic, positions from a collective imagination that, when performed, afford access to experiences beyond one’s mundane cultural position. In dislocating playlisting practices from the listener’s identity, I argue that POV playlists offer a blueprint for resistance against algorithmic surveillance and control.

Supervised by Dr. Leonardo Impett

Mapping the Internet Rabbit Hole: Polysemy, Paralogy, and Iceberg Charts

Cambridge, Portfolio Essay, 2023

How do we find common ground when we’re falling down the internet rabbit hole?

Generative Music AI: Heteroglossia and Homoglossia as a Framework for Computational Authorship

Cambridge, Portfolio Essay, 2022

Who composes what? And other questions in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Listening to Listening: Youtube Music Reaction Videos, Affective Tints, and Yebba’s Audience-Inferred Blackness

Oxford, BA Dissertation, 2021-2022

How do YouTube “reaction videos” change how we perceive media?

To answer this, I investigate the culture of reactivity surrounding the white American singer-songwriter, Yebba. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of reaction videos and their comments, I propose that reactor’s responses cast an “affective tint” over Yebba’s performances which amplify racialized discourse on not just reaction videos, but the original performances, too. In turn, this reiterates the multi-sourced and ephemeral construction of ostensibly immutable identities like race.

Supervised by Dr. Edward K. Spencer and Professor Georgina Born

“Let Sonorities Ring”: Meeting Julius Eastman Beyond Parenthesis

Oxford, Portfolio Essay, 2022

Is the "canon" the right memory technology to remember those it has erased?

“the lights are tinted green”: Kankyō Ongaku’s Resurgence as Comfortable Scenery

Oxford, Portfolio Essay, 2022

When does old music go viral?

Chromatic Plots: Haydn, Enharmonicism, and Post-Kurthian Perspectives on the “Classical” String Quartet

Oxford, Analysis Portfolio, 2022

Proof that, despite my best efforts, I did actually study some music!

Some things I do for fun 🌊 §

Music (todo)

Climbing

12-2023 - 🇮🇪 I’ve been bouldering for four months now and it’s safe to say I’m hooked. Progress has slowed a little since my first V5 in late October, but I think I am becoming a more technical climber. So here’s hoping I get some V6s and V7s in the New Year!

Photography

12-2023 - 🇨🇭 §

Surfing (todo)

Art (todo)

Poetry (todo)